“Let’s create a world, where at every level, everyone belongs.”
Illustrations left to right: Mark Wang, Elise Vandeplancke, and Teo Georgiev for Fine Acts
What does belonging look like in practice? How can we visualize the act of bridging diverse communities? What would our world look like if we overcame the cleavages that often divide society (such as race, class, or religion)?
These are all questions that we asked ourselves in our collaboration with our amazing partners from the Democracy & Belonging Forum, an initiative by the Othering & Belonging Institute at the University of California, Berkeley. The forum is a network of leaders committed to bridging across differences and advancing belonging for marginalized groups.
Together, we created a new set of visuals – that anyone can use and adapt, free of charge – to accompany stories and narratives that focus on bridging and belonging and show that this is a possible future, in response to the current challenges we are facing as humanity.
Why? Because by creating awesome visual content on important social issues we can actually show what it means to cross the lines of difference to build a larger “us” – while raising visibility and engagement, and fostering understanding and empathy.
The Bridging and Belonging open-license collection of powerful illustrations features over 70 artworks. For it, we commissioned 40 artists from around the world to create works on our future vision, solutions and hope. We also organized a global open call for existing works on the topic – where we received over 220 submissions, out of which 30 artists were distinguished by our jury.
All works can be found on TheGreats.co – our unique global platform for free social impact visuals. By publishing all artworks under an open license, we also offer a solution to a key problem for many NGOs, grassroots groups, and activists, as they often lack the capacity and resources to create compelling visual materials that make their essential work or campaigns visible.
The collection is a tool for nonprofits, activists and citizens anywhere to call for a future where we all belong.